


Five times Sherlock and Lestrade never met and one time they didn’t part: The Eternal Return

by grassle



Series: Five times Sherlock and Lestrade never met [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Complete, Happy Ending, M/M, Major Character Injury, Return
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-27
Updated: 2013-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 20:24:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grassle/pseuds/grassle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Disclaimer: I don't own these characters from the BBC's <i>Sherlock</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <i>“The symbol perfects itself by the accumulation of approximations. As such, it is comparable to a spiral, or rather, a solenoid, which each repetition brings closer to its target.”</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Gilbert Durand, <i>L'Imagination symbolique</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Five times Sherlock and Lestrade never met and one time they didn’t part: The Eternal Return

**Author's Note:**

> Quotations from the Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson  
> http://www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk
> 
> NB. Sherlock’s hiatus is only a year in my fics as I have a very short attentio

**The Eternal Return**

He’d promised himself, forced himself, that he wouldn’t do this again. And he’d cut down a lot. He really had. Some days he didn’t do it at all. But today, here, his first day back in his own borough command, his old station, finally worked back up to inspector, he backslid. Indulged. Gave in. Had to. He’d say it was to take the edge off – didn’t most addicts say that? – but that wasn’t it. If anything, it sharpened things. Maybe that was the point. Lestrade took a blast of coffee as he waited for John’s blog to load. He was afraid things might blunt. He wanted them sharp. Honed enough to wound afresh, to inflict a new stab of pain. Preferred that to muffled. To dullness. To _forgetting_.

Sherlock’s Web site had long been taken down, early on after he’d – John’s blog remained. Probably didn’t know how to delete it. No – he’d figured out how to delete all the comments and disable or freeze new ones. Maybe he left the write-ups of the cases posted as…a memorial. Living testament. Reminder. Whatever, it was Lestrade’s fix. And he’d take the biggest hit possible today. Start right at the beginning.

Oh, not the start of his and Sherlock’s relationship, of course. Lestrade stared unseeing at that stupidly cheerful photo on the screen as he tried again but still couldn’t remember how far back their liaison begun. He had vague memories of them knowing each other as kids, in Somerset, and at uni in Manchester. Impossible of course – the age difference, the geographical distance and the class barrier were all insurmountable. Showed how desperate the mind was to cushion itself from too-big shocks. Even if it went a bit mad in its making of a cushion. Big crash mat, more like. Which Sherlock could – No; beginning here, was when John with his stupid world-traveller photos joined the story, blowing up all Lestrade’s hopes and dreams like he’d lobbed a grenade into them.

_I think he might be mad. He was certainly arrogant and really quite rude and he looks about 12 and he's clearly a bit public school and, yes, I definitely think he might be mad but he was also strangely likeable. He was charming._

Lestrade didn’t need to read the words written in the first entry, or any at all. He knew them all. _I'm not a writer,_ John had also said: his second sentence. True. But that description of Sherlock was perfect. Well, _charming_? He could be, to get what he wanted. _It's no use trying to hide what you are because Sherlock sees right through everyone and everything in seconds._ Also true. _Nothing ever happens to me. But today, something did. Something happened._ That dug in a spike of pain. It could describe Lestrade’s life, too, with Sherlock in it. _Something happened._ Oh, this similarity between him and John hurt. But he welcomed that. Fed off the dagger bite.

To begin at the beginning, as all the best tales had it. And that was _Pink_.

 

Pink was the colour of love, or passion, they said. He recalled the confident pink of Jennifer Wilson’s suit, her shoes, and nails and lips as she came to London to meet her lover. The pink of her lost-and-found case. The slight tinge of the same shade on Sherlock’s cheeks, on finding Lestrade waiting in his new flat, conducting a drugs bust to get said case. Payback, that had been, if he were brave enough to be honest. Lestrade touched a slightly shaky hand to his cheek now, as if testing for a new heat wave of the shocking pink, _shocked_ pink he’d experienced that long-ago day, after asking Sherlock if he wanted to move in with him, Sherlock being evicted and all and Lestrade having that spare room and all and being stupidly in love with him and all. That subtext hadn’t been spoken aloud – hadn’t needed to be. Maybe there was a ‘flame pink’ shade too: his offer – no, more; _he_ – had been shot down in flames all right. Sherlock had met John.

And yet Lestrade found it hard to blame John. Liked him, actually, for looking after Sherlock. Saving his life. Of course he knew about that kill shot. Was glad about it. And for the thousand other quieter and softer ways John took care of Sherlock and understood him. Had right from the off. Lestrade couldn’t look at all that entry as it mentioned Donovan, and her later treachery still made him want to tear her limb from limb. He skipped on. …described Sherlock as a child and, in many ways, that's what he is. Like a child, he just doesn't understand the rules of society… Yeah. If it couldn’t be him, he’d rather it was someone like John. Because they were alike, warming their hands around the sun king, Sherlock: _I can't deny that I prefer this kind of life. Being a civilian doesn't suit me._ Lestrade too.

And better John, better _anyone_ than that fucking ex of Sherlock’s, that merchant wanker twat Sherlock had taken a case for. _Blind_. Good word, yeah. And permeated not just that City bank case, what could be understood from John’s hysterical, breathless retelling, but the whole, _God_ , shooting match. He often wondered if (hoped) John were blind to Lestrade’s feelings for Sherlock. Wondered if Sherlock was to, come to that. Before and after that disastrous day, day one pre-John. Because he thought Sherlock had deleted it after. Sometimes he fancied he’d been pulling the wool over his own eyes, making himself think Sherlock had cared for him, had been trying on a few occasions to… All those fucking near misses. If he wasn’t deluding himself about them. He wished he’d worked that case, not Dimmock. He’d have had a few words with that fancy nancy banker bloke. Although seemed John had done that. The pathetic effective management course he’d been away on at that time had been the blind leading the blind. Up a blind alley.

Lestrade jumped suddenly as the window blinds behind him – strange coincidence – shook a little. Someone must have come in the fire exit door from the ‘smokers’ lounge’. Never had got that draft thing sorted, it seemed. Someone was in early. Smoking early. And so on to _Game_. Oh, so apt. He smiled a little, a tired, grey sort of grimace as he tried to capture a vicarious jolt of Sherlock’s energy as they’d all witnessed it then. Oh, so much of life had been a game to that kid. Racing around London like the city was his own private treasure hunt, a game laid out for him and his running mate of the day. No; his game pieces. Even John. With his game leg. Yet game for anything. Lestrade tried hard to keep upbeat here, but couldn’t help rereading the premonition; John’s ominous summing up at the end of the prior case:

  
_But he's becoming known. People know of him. How long before someone else comes after him? And what happens to the people like Mrs Hudson when that happens?_

  
_All these people he involves in his adventures... They're not safe. We're not safe. There are forces out there and they're coming for Sherlock Holmes._

  
Fair game, they’d all been to Sherlock. Pawns. Him a king, or a knight. But he was getting ahead of himself there, with those two word choices. Poor ones they were. Because Sherlock played up and played the game, when needed. Solved the puzzles, got the right answers. If it had been a game show, he’d have walked off with the car, for sure.

No, they’d all been playthings to that mad bastard criminal, him directing them over his intercom like a deranged Charlie and all of London’s citizens his pressganged Angels. Yeah. Moriarty had styled himself the grandmaster, the games meister, whatever, snatching them all them to rattle them around and chuck them out to fall where they would. Big game animals. What was his fucking game? And what had that endgame been. He’d seen that message on the Science of Deduction about the pool. And when he’d got there, it had been empty of all but John and Sherlock, giggling like drunken students. Game, set and match?

Moriarty played a long game. He’d turned up in the next case on John’s blog. _Scandal_. It bloody had been. And equally as scandalous were Lestrade’s dealings with and for Sherlock, just like had emerged in the enquiry. He’d fudged things to hide Sherlock’s involvement, or the extent of it in his and his division’s cases, when he shouldn’t have got Sherlock on board at all, according to the panel. Worse, he’d covered up for him when he definitely shouldn’t have. Not just in the beginning, when Sherlock was still using, but all throughout their relationship.

Like with that American bloke, Neilson, wasn’t it, he’d found ‘burgling his flat’, and beaten the crap out of, for hurting Mrs Hudson. He’d half killed the bloke, oh, sorry, the bloke ‘had been startled to hear the flat’s lawful occupant arriving home and had fallen from the window.’ Beating himself to a pulp on the way down. Sherlock had had to tell Lestrade the truth about the case then, when the bloke’s being CIA had set alarm bells ringing at the station as he was processed in

And there’d been plenty more ‘public embarrassment’ throughout the case. Sherlock’s moping, for one. Didn’t like being bested. No one did. Lestrade remembered that cheer-up-Sherlock party, and Mrs Hudson –

No. No matter how masochistic Lestrade was being, inflicting these slings and arrows on himself, he wasn’t glutton enough to think of her. The woman, and her relationship to Sherlock, brought him closer. Wait. That was a stupid thing to think, when he’d set out to do just that, wallowing in thoughts of him. No, it was more she brought him _real_ , living, _human_. And that was harder to deal with. Sherlock in the abstract was easier to process. A monolith, part of London like the Landseer lions or Cleopatra’s needle. Yeah. Much better to consider him as this colossus, this whirlwind, bestriding London, leaving dust in his wake as he whirled about. Oh, not just London. He’d been working in Minsk, apparently, and Lestrade knew he extended his playing field to the country.

To Baskerville. Huh, one _hound_ or two, or none. Must be a collective noun. Hounded as well, Sherlock had been. Lestrade turned from the screen for a moment to shut his eyes and focus hard on Sherlock human, then less than, scared, lost, twitching in the aftermath, strung out on substances. At least in Devon, unlike the old days, he’d had his own doctor to take care of him. When _he_ wasn’t being drugged out of his head.

Lestrade finished his coffee and chucked the container in the bin. First rubbish of his new tenancy, his new term of office, in his new-old office. First day on job. Yeah, contrary to what many believed, Sherlock was human. Both the previous case and this had shaken him. A sign of things to come. Yet how happy he’d been to be vindicated. Back on track. London’s darling. Its _enfant cherie, enfant terrible_ , take your pick. Preening and strutting and proud and then the –

_Fall_. Well, pride came before it. Rise and fall. In the States, they called Autumn Fall. Easy to see why. ‘You cannot fool all the people all the time.’ American too. Oh look, the king’s got no clothes. No wings either. Lestrade twisted his mind away from this string of negatives, this knotted rope of tarnished pearls. _He’d_ come unstrung, had been on his own too. Had been suspended. Oh, how he wished Sherlock had. Was. Wished him on a physical high, suspended, floating like a feather or a superhero. Stupid hero. He had a coat, not a magic cape. He didn’t get free from the fall. Lestrade had been in free-fall for the whole of the last year, since that day, that moment. It’d taken him this whole time to crawl back in at the Met. Least he wasn’t back in the ranks.

He jumped at the sound at his door, startling equally the cleaning woman who evidently hadn’t expected to find anyone in here. He tried to be friendly, normal, asking her name, but she didn’t understand. She pointed to her name badge, and he couldn’t pronounce the word written on it. Great start. He moved away from his desk to let her dust, or wipe, and celebrated the one-year anniversary of Sherlock’s death by reading through all his saved text messages from him. He’d saved his e-mails too. Knew ’em all by heart.

And maybe the human presence in the room, slight contact as it was, gave him the strength to flick through his memories of the year, like riffling through snapshots. His memories centred around two people, his two fellow believers. Mrs Hudson, who’d refused to take more tenants, who’d left 221B as it was on that day, and who’d gone out to work to pay her bills instead. She’d gone away for a while after the funeral, hounded as they’d all been, even here at the station. That’d pissed off the higher-ups, at least.

And John. Just as Martha had aged and slowed, John had grown sunken and faded. He’d left London for a while, taken long-term locum work for agencies. He’d been quieter and more deadened every time Lestrade had seen him. Older. Wiser? Sadder. He hadn’t had a relationship in the time and had long confessed there had been nothing like that between him and Sherlock. John wasn’t gay. He didn’t think. Just, Lestrade suspected, he would’ve done anything for his flatmate, that included. Given half a chance. He hadn’t been. He still believed.

As did he. The cleaning woman left, her nervous smile the highlight of his day so far. He re-read the welcome e-mail about him they’d all received. Yeah, the dust had settled, and they’d spun his absence into attachment to projects and a focus on non-core duties while he was retraining. _Rehabilitating_. Paying his penance. Earning his second chance. And look at him, trying to live up to it, in early, nicely dressed…and wishing he wasn’t here. He wanted to show them all, of course he did, all those bastards hopping on the bandwagon and making a joke of it. And that campaign, started by Sherlock’s readers, had just given them more ammo. Given them a glib catchphrase at any rate. All those ‘I believes’ in a voice like a preacher, or ‘I want to believes,’ like Fox Mulder. And that fuck-awful Cher song people had thought it funny to play… Eventually it too had died a death.

Because there were always new scandals; political corruption, public sector mismanagement, private sector greed, police blunders, border control fuck-ups, high-profile paedophiles – whatever. Today’s news, tomorrow’s chip wrappers. Not that they wrapped chips in newspaper anymore. Tomorrow’s toilet paper for dogs? Nah – you didn’t see people carrying rolled-up newspapers under their arm while they were walking their dog, not these days. Dogs did their business on the street and people collected in in bags. _God. Christ almighty._ From lost love to dog shit. Said it all.

He was glad of the beep of his mobile. His sister, wishing him luck on his first day back. She hadn’t understood, not any of it, of course, but she cared. Did John’s sister help, get him through it? Let him talk about it all? Maybe John avoided the reminder. Like Lestrade had avoided the souvenirs.

Mrs Hudson had urged him to take something, and he’d looked at the stuff lined up on the mantelpiece. First and foremost had been the skull, of course. He associated that with Sherlock – he’d seen it all of his domiciles. Caught the smug look on Sherlock’s face as he waited for people to ask an idiotic question about it. Lestrade had denied him the satisfaction, though he’d burned to know about it. Someone had put that stupid deerstalker hat on the skull. Sherlock? That sight had been a punch to the gut. Winded, doubled over, he’d grabbed the ledge, snatching at air. The tiepin. The cufflinks. Sherlock’s knife, skewering something flat. He couldn’t remember what it had been, and felt angry and sad at that lapse. He was…starting to forget.

Then, tucked away at the back, he’d found Sherlock’s violin resin. And rubbing his finger over it, he’d been socked in the stomach anew at finding the missing element to Sherlock’s scent in its sharp, fresh, herbal tang. Oh, Sherlock’s surface smell was the wet-dog whiff of his fog-damp overcoat, like a lot of Londoners. Only in Sherlock’s case, that damp cloth smell had jostled against chemicals: iron and salts. Like the faerie folk. Or to keep them away. Lestrade wasn’t up on lore. Then there was the warm kitchen-and-biscuit smells of Mrs Hudson’s flat. She was rubbing off on him. Just as John was, with that ghost-of-tea-and-toast that clung to him. Of course, Sherlock also had that faint tang there was no hope of replicating, of expensive toiletries and cologne and even old paper.

But this Lestrade could and did indulge in. He slid open his desk drawer now and contrasted the crystalline, twisty sugar look of the bit he’d let dry with the shining amber in its square green cardboard box. It was a fat and rounded solid, a bit like the Pears soap of his childhood, laid on soft cloth like window leather which folded over to cradle it when the box was shut. It was German. He loved unwrapping it, to see it gleam, like a sweet or a jewel. He owed Sherlock a new box. He looked it up on the Net from time to time and went into music shops, first thing he did on going to a new area, but this was old. Not easy to obtain. He didn’t mind. He liked being shown and discussing all the different pots and tubs. Because this was his choice. He chose not to move on, to heal, to become whole. He preferred the aching, gaping black hole, the bleached-white bleakness of loss, and he worked to maintain it, to live in and with it. His decision.

The ring of his desk phone cut into his anointing ritual, and he shut the drawer as he dealt with HR. Yes, he was here, and ready, willing and able. And with IT, checking his phone line and that he’d recorded a message for the answer phone and knew how to engage the Follow-Me and… It was all written right there on the side of the phone. But it was good, actually: people were arriving, filling the station room. He’d lost that initial moment of advantage, of when best to go out and meet and greet. He’d do it in a minute and pretend he’d been on the phone all the time, instead of as now, making reassuring noises to the empty line. They could and did see him through his half-open door, phone jammed between his neck and shoulder.

Lestrade rubbed the resin residue smeared on his fingers, and it naturally made him think of Sherlock playing the violin, and how much of his life had been performance, had been playacting. How much of his…death? Because insight clobbered him along with the realisation that this was what he was doing now, playing a part, to fool people. To protect –

His fingers were so slippery he almost dropped his mobile as he went to answer its buzz of a message. Four words. Well, the last one not technically a word, but… Just his name, an imperative, and a monogram, which, when added to the sender’s number, froze the blood in his veins. _Greg. Look up. SH._

“If anyone’s playing a fucking joke, I’ll –”

And looking through the open door was like looking down a tunnel into the past. He didn’t recall having left his chair, having moved, but he was near enough to hear the murmured “Greg,” a sound which almost stopped his heart, just as the sight of Sherlock, there, coat, scarf everything as if he thought people wouldn’t recognise him in anything different, made his heart threaten to explode from his chest. It was impossible, but he knew it was real. It was different from the fading-as-he-woke dream visions and the tall-dark-haired-person-in-the-crowd sightings he’d had of Sherlock. This was real. He was real.

The wave of mutters became louder, crashed to a rocky shore as Sherlock stretched his arms out to the sides and turned slowly in a circle. Unarmed? No magic tricks up my sleeve? Give us a twirl? _Surrendering?_ Then came a noise and a sharp movement somewhere at the back of Lestrade, and in that moment Sherlock leapt towards Donovan. Lost, bemused, Lestrade bounded towards her too, and that was why the assassin, his gun snatched from his desk drawer, didn’t shoot him in the head, or indeed anywhere vital, when he fired. Meaning Lestrade was only slightly shot, although it didn’t feel like it, as he spiralled down from his trajectory, unconscious.

 

**In my end is my beginning**

Consciousness hurt. In films, it was a nice bit of music, close-up of a pristine bed in a private room surrounded by anxious loved ones and a whole army of medical staff who all gasped and clapped as the patient opened clear, bright eyes in a perfectly made-up or shaved face, depending on gender. Well, and the sort of film it was. Reality was a dry thud to awake, him drooly and tense like he’d woken himself up snoring in a cramped position.

He kept still, assessing. Hospital. Shoulder immobilised. Shot. Bastard. What’d he ever done to that bloke. Could barely recall him, just remembered him from that final case. Some people. He tried his times tables and some French irregular verbs, old-school checking against brain damage. Seemed okay. He swallowed and decided to try working his eyes.

Oh. As if the action of prying open gummy lids had jumpstarted his other senses, he felt the softness of springy curls under his right hand, and as his fingers scrunched into them, his nostrils worked to breathe in deep that unmistakeable lab-and-London scent. _Sherlock._ Here. With him.

“Funny.” Lestrade’s voice was rough and thick, his original accent strong. He sounded like his Granddad and his friends, old men he remembered from his youth. He petted the head under his hand, taking in the bottom half of the long, slim body half sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair at his bedside and the top half twisted to lie even more uncomfortably facedown on his bed. Beside him.

“What.” The reply was a soft purr.

“This.” He lifted his hand so Sherlock could turn to look at him. He gestured with his chin. “Always figured it’d be the other way round.” He tightened his fingers, rubbing and caressing, smoothing the wild curls back from the forehead and slyly tracing a cheekbone with his little finger. “Wanna explain? Why I’m missing all the first-day-back excitement? And why you got me shot?”

Sherlock uncurled and shifted to sit next to him, looking down at him. He looked affronted. “Donovan, different hit man. There’s always something!”

Lestrade waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. He gave a cough, his throat scratchy from anaesthetic, if he remembered rightly. Sherlock poured him a plastic cup of the drink on the locker, his long fingers thinner now as he held the cup to Lestrade’s lips. He stared at the remains of the sticky orange liquid after rather than Lestrade. His hand wasn’t quite steady as he eventually replaced the cup on the locker.

“Oh, do help yourself to fruit. You look like you need it.” Lestrade waited, raised-eyebrowed, but Sherlock didn’t offer any explanation. Didn’t explain why he looked older and thinner, and had deep lines on his face. Why, despite Lestrade being the one fresh out of emergency surgery, Sherlock looked shattered.

“I’ll…take some for later, if I may,” Sherlock eventually muttered.

“You… I… This…” Lestrade couldn’t speak for laughing, well, wheezing, so gave up. He stopped laughing at the look on the face staring down at him. That face he thought lost to him, to everyone. A look he’d never expected to see. One he recognised – because his own face wore it, although he thought he’d kept it hidden from Sherlock. Of course he hadn’t. His feelings were plain to see, and they’d grown so much during the absence.

“Sherlock. While you were away. Dead. No; away.” He had to try, try and fathom the reason behind the yearning, the softness, the spark of hope he was looking at. “I never…”

“ _I_ did.”

And that was cryptic and gnomic and should have been incomprehensible, especially as Sherlock dropped his head, shielding his expression. But Lestrade wouldn’t let him. He got his muscles working to make his hand push Sherlock’s chin up, and as Sherlock raised his head, the antiseptic, metallic space between them was filled with the flickers and shadows of the past. All their past. All of them. All of Sherlock.

The shapes coalesced into a strange-eyed little boy, precocious, absorbed, isolated. The form solidified into a lonely child, braving the world because of the force of his convictions, yet stammering and vulnerable in his loneliness. Lestrade saw the fiercely intelligent and alienated teenager and then the withdrawn young man, using drugs to keep a hostile world at bay. He watched Sherlock grow into himself, into an adult, brilliant, unconventional, but in many ways still troubled. Still…incomplete.

And somehow they were one: he was holding Sherlock tight to him with his working arm and kissing him, no; giving Sherlock the kisses he hadn't been able to give his past versions, all those iterations he’d seen, met, puzzled over, reacted to, been shaped by. So many kisses. Huge, face-and-soul melding kisses, imprinting and marking and making up for lost time. Lighter ones, softer caresses, learning, shaping those impossible lips. And tiny darts and pecks; accepting, taking. It was a journey back through time, down the years, all their incarnations meeting and understanding and forming each other, with the last kiss a soft press of Greg’s lips to Sherlock’s cheek, a tiny hello to the child of all those years ago, from whom he’d never more part.

Not so much a full circle as a...circle in a spiral? Nah - that was a song. Ancient one too. He was showing his age. This was more like...infinity. Mathematically inevitable. 'Course it was. Greg grinned and saw Sherlock's face bloom with an answering smile of pure, incandescent joy as they held each other tight.


End file.
